This blog is a place where I write about tools and ideas related to teaching, technology, and making.

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Exploring the Light Blue Bean

Earlier this summer, I ordered a Light Blue Bean from punchthrough.com/bean, a gadget I wasn't ready to play with until today. This small chip, which you can see blinking on the left, is a wirelessly programmable microprocessor that uses the Arduino IDE and Bluetooth. It is about an inch tall by two inches wide and is powered by a 3V coin cell battery. Since it communicates over Bluetooth, there are no wires to connect when programming! So far, I've only uploaded a couple of sample sketchs and started playing around with the settings. I haven't yet committed to a sample project, but I'm interested seeing where this exploration leads. One of the tutorials on their website has directions for creating an "evil goat" with LED eyes that can be controlled by an iPhone! What's not to love about that?

This is what the Bean Loader looks like in Windows 10. I've got a special version of Arduino opened up on the the left. Once you've uploaded the code there, it goes into a folder on your hard drive. From there, you select, "Program" to wireless upload the code to the device.

For the first five years of my career, I taught middle and high school students history and language arts in Vermont. More recently, I've been teaching workshops related to the maker movement and educational tech.